Distro Fever VIII: The Maddening?

Actually I have a Synology NAS that (when a desktop was my daily driver) I used for all non-OS working storage. However, now that I’m using a laptop daily the NAS has almost entirely transitioned to being a backup target. I initially thought my daughter (who has now moved out) and wife would also use the NAS for their files, but that was apparently overoptimistic on my part… :smiley:

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The endless quest to convert people to the “free” digital life :grin: A hard one no doubt. Had to work hard myself even just to sell signal to a few of them.

Me: “Your file was saved on the NAS, right?”
Them: “Which file?”
Me: “The one you just said you can’t find.”
Them: “I can’t find it!!”
Me: “Yeah, I know. It was saved on the NAS, right?”
Them: “I guess… I don’t know!?!”
Me: " Well, where did you save it?"
Them: "I don’t know… ON THE COMPUTER!! "
Me: “Arghhhh!”

So much for ‘retirement’ from IT … :crazy_face:

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“Dave’s not here.”

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At least they remember their password?

“Dave?”
“Yeah, man, Dave! I’m Dave. I got the stuff man. Let me in, I think the cops saw me.”
“Oh, Dave!”
“Yeah, Dave”

“… Dave’s not here, man”

Funny stuff. I love the brief little sketch that ends with “Hey man, did really sound like cops??” :rofl:

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Oh yeah. And to be fair, lest anyone think I’m picking on the ladies I’ve had worse from guys. :smiley:

A story

My wife’s uncle (who passed away from cancer in 2005, RIP) was a salty old dog, a real manly man’s man with a heart of gold deep beneath his crusty exterior. At 16 he lied about his age and enlisted in the US Marine Corps. They rewarded him with an all-expenses-paid trip straight to the beach at Guadalcanal in 1942. After WWII he was (among many other things) a crop-duster pilot with over 30,000 flying hours. By the way – More pilots die, per hours flown, in agricultural flying than in combat. Anyway, he bought a computer about five years before he died and decided I was his personal IT department.

I came back to work from lunch one day and there was a red light on my phone. His message:

"This computer is broke, It won’t …
I ain’t talkin’ to no damn machine"

*click*

I called him back (the names have been changed to protect the guilty).

Me: “Uncle Frank, it’s Len”

Uncle Frank: “This computer is broke. It ain’t workin’.”

Me: “What’s broken? What are you trying to do?”

Uncle Frank: “I click on that thang and it just … then it … IT’S BROKE !!”

Me: “OK, are you clicking on an icon?”

Uncle Frank: “Hell yeah.”

(One of his sons, “Jim” – definitely a chip off his salty block, too – owned a computer store at the time.)

Me: “Did you talk to Jim?”

Uncle Frank: “Yeah… he won’t talk to me about it. He says I need to stop going to bed so early, stay up and play with this computer to learn it.”

(I elected to not echo my agreement with Jim’s assessment.)

Uncle Frank: “Look I ain’t got time to talk to you now on the phone. Come down here and fix it.”

(We lived about half an hour away and were in fact planning on visiting a couple of days later, so…)

Me: “OK, we’ll be down Sunday afternoon and I’ll take a look.”

Uncle Frank: “Awwright… bye”

Turns out his arthritic hand wasn’t able to reliably double-click, so he was having intermittent issues no matter what the double-click threshold was set to. I showed him how to single-click, then either hit Enter or right-click and select “Open”. He was delighted.

His parting shot to me: “You’re way smarter than Jim.”

Yeah, right - Whatever. :laughing:

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Should have introduced him to my mother in law. She called to say she had a strange message on the screen “about F1” and didn’t understand what race cars at to do with PCs. It turned out that she had move her PC and to make things easier, had unplugged the keyboard (those with a mini-DIN). When plugging it back in, she wasn’t well aligned and just pushed the plug harder, thus bending all the pins to the bottom of the plug. Having brought my electronic repair tool bag just in case I managed to straighten them out…

And, “F1” is part of a silly message you got when the keyboard is not detected: No keyboard detected, strike F1 to continue or some such.

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I once answered a desktop support ticket for one of our corporate financial / risk analysis gurus. He couldn’t get his laptop to connect to the network in his office. This was in the days of the old Compaq Armada laptops with an RJ11 telephone port, RJ45 Ethernet port, custom mobile phone port, PCMCIA cards / ports, DB9 serial port, DB15 video port, parallel printer port… (we won’t even go into multiple hardware profiles that could be chosen before boot). You should’ve seen what was plugged – or not – into what. Whether the plug(s) fit the jack(s) or not didn’t matter. All he had to do was unplug everything and put it into the docking station on his desk. You know, the one with the 21" monitor instead of the 14" laptop screen. It has a powered locking mechanism that would’ve literally pulled it from his hands when it made contact with the laptop.

But apparently that was too difficult.

This was the primary guy deciding what was and wasn’t too risky for the company… yikes.

Yeah, IIRC that was an older IBM CMOS / BIOS message.

Reading this thread reminds me of that episode of The Simpsons (I can’t recall which one):

COMPUTER: “Press any key to continue.”
HOMER: “Lisa! Where’s the ‘any’ key?!”

My standard arrangement with my relatives is that I am only willing to touch their computer if it runs Linux (and then they get full support).

This has been going on for decades now, and is working out fine. They usually get (X)Ubuntu, on automatic upgrade (I do the release upgrades manually), full incremental backup to my home server every hour, and an icon to let me into their desktop remotely. Standard trimmings include an adblocker and other browser plugins, and a password manager with instructions on how to use it.

Everyone is happy, including me. In the last 10 years the only non-routine maintenance was tracking down a hardware issue (it was a memory problem, and took a day until I started suspecting it and ran memtest).

Fortunately my IT support duties have pretty much died a death of attrition. And I’m not going to resurrect them! :smiley: It’s just me and my wife now, and she’s stable.

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I think I caught the remix of that on the 90’s show recently, but for obvious reasons my memory isn’t what it used to be…

It’s a Cheech and Chong routine.

I remember it well…long term memory seems better than short these days.

I spent a cold winter afternoon with those two guys in Rochester, NY in the early 70’s. Did an interview with them for the local college radio station. Fun day!

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In high school in the early '70s, recall being in English class and one of the students had their “Big Bambu” album in his stack of books. We finished class early, the teacher asked him what kind of music he had. He gave a terse “comedy” reply, trying hard to fend off attention, but she was having none of that, wanted to play the album to discuss it’s possible contribution to the body of English Literature… She was very grateful when the bell rang, about the time she found out “Dave’s not here…” :laughing:

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I have worked with those types, before. They really are geniuses at what they do, but sometimes they don’t seem to have “walking around sense”.

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How about trying to steer this thread back onto its proper path?

Presently, I favour endeavourOS, even if it is difficult to spell.

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

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So far so good with Garuda for the most part. It was acting up a little the other day but an update fixed it.
I did start to consider nuking it for an Arch install but I’m okay now. :slight_smile:

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@lphilpot ;

Resilio Sync is your friend.

It’s on all my boxes, Windows and Linux, and on my Synology NAS.

Seamless back up.